J. Mey – Concise Encyclopedia of Pragmatics (Second edition)

Автор: J. Mey
Название книги: Concise Encyclopedia of Pragmatics (Second edition)
Формат: PDF
Жанр: Лингвистика
Страницы: 1183
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

Concise Encyclopedia of Pragmatics (COPE) 2e is an authoritative single-volume reference resource comprehensively describing the discipline of pragmatics, an important branch of natural language study dealing with the study of language in it's entire user-related theoretical and practical complexity.

As a derivative volume from Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics 2e, it comprises contributions from the foremost scholars of semantics in their various specializations and draws on 20+ years of development in the parent work in a compact and affordable format. Principally intended for tertiary level inquiry and research, this will be invaluable as a reference work for undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as academics inquiring into the study of meaning and meaning relations within languages. As pragmatics is a centrally important and inherently cross-cutting area within linguistics, it will therefore be relevant not just for meaning specialists, but for most linguistic audiences.

* Edited by Jacob Mey, a leading pragmatics specialist, and authored by experts
* The latest trends in the field authoritatively reviewed and interpreted in context of related disciplines
* Drawn from the richest, most authoritative, comprehensive and internationally acclaimed reference resource in the linguistics area
* Compact and affordable single volume reference format

There are certain activities in our lives that seem to be endlessly repeating themselves: we witness an apparently
endless construction of houses, office buildings, roads and highways, and other infrastructures; there is the
preparation and consumption of foodstuffs; there is the daily maintenance of the quarters we live in; there are
the recurrent activities governing our use of the markets, small and big; and so on and so forth.
Similarly, writing articles and essays may, for some people, seem to have the same repetitive and perhaps even
monotonous character. Still, there is a difference. Writing (or for that matter, all communicative action) is
always directed at a person or group of persons; even the most monologic self-expressing poetry always
addresses somebody (even though, in extreme cases, the audience is restricted to the poet him-or herself). In
addition, the repetitive character of, say, housework may prompt our easy-going consorts to protest against the
making of beds or the cleaning of kitchens, with the motivation that ‘beds have to be made again anyway, so
why not just let them be’, or: ‘dust is going to happen, so why not just adjust ourselves to a lower than needy
standard of cleanliness’. In contrast, activities having to do with communication (in particular, writing) do not
only affect the author (the ‘originator’, or auctor, with an old-fashioned term), but also, and perhaps to an even
higher degree, the ‘end user’: the recipient, in our case, the reader.
But, some reader might object, what has all this to do with the current (concise) encyclopedia of language and
linguistics that I am looking at right now? The answer is that encyclopedias, like all works of letters, presuppose
our cooperation as readers. In and through the act of reading, we align ourselves with the author whose text we
are perusing and with whom we are cooperating. And even though encyclopedias may seem to embody just
what the word means: an all-round paideia (which is the Greek word for ‘upbringing’), to a cursory observer it
may seem that such works only pretend to satisfy an individual’s desire to know a factoid or two, or to delve a
little deeper into a certain area of knowledge. What is often overlooked is the interactive feature that is built into
the very essence of encyclopedic work, no matter how apparently passive in character on the part of the reader.
It is no secret that many encyclopedias have been the forerunners of revolutions, as I pointed out in the Preface
to the first edition of this Concise Encyclopedia. And what I wrote back in 1998 is just as true today as it
was then:
The purpose of an Encyclopedia, according to the original (1750–1769) encyclope´distes, the French literates and
philosophers Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, is to enlighten the population in order to make them choose
the right way of leading their lives, free from the encumbrances of false beliefs and authoritarian doctrines. This apparent
innocent and worthy aim had much wider and more profound consequences for society than its proposers could ever have
foreseen, as we now know, with the benefit of historical hindsight. Two hundred years after the American, the French,
and countless other revolutions, the encyclopedia has become a standard household fixture, and it is hard to imagine, by
looking at the impressive, often leather-bound volumes that adorn the bookshelves of better-off households around the
planet, how the original ideals of democratizing enlightenment could have had such strong political, even revolutionary
side effects. (Mey 1998:xxv)
By the double token of being iterative and revolutionary, encyclopedias, while pretending to codify the
knowledge they conserve and propagate, also reflect the societal interaction that is at their base. And this is,
finally, why encyclopedias have to be constantly updated and ‘re-cycled’. The British author Patrick Leigh Fermor describes, in one of his erudite ‘travelogues’, how he, as a young man
roaming across the old Hapsburg domain, always found solace in the encyclopedias he discovered in the
libraries of the manors and castles to which influential friends had given him introductions. Thus, the traveler
found himself ‘‘poring over Meyers Konversationslexikon’’ during his stay at a castle in Rumania, while trying
to update his knowledge of Central European history (Hungarian and Transylvanian in particular; Leigh
Fermor 2005: 101)—in more or less the same way that I, in an earlier period of my life and some twenty
years later, helped by Meyer, familiarized myself with the beautiful railway stations and city halls that had once
adorned cities like Metz and Strasbourg in what had been the (then) German Reichsland Elsass-Lothringen.
I recall the historic frisson I experienced, due in part to the fact that many of those magnificent building had long
since fallen prey to the combined forces of war and regressive architectural ideologies, posing as progressive
notions.
The ‘melancholy of art’, melanconia dell’arte, that I perceived contrasted with the urgent need to move on
with history, in the same way as it happened for the English author years ago, during a journey through a
landscape that was in continuous flux, always on the brink of disappearing into the local and historical horizon,
only experienced by ‘being there’, in real life or in the vicarious existence of an encyclopedia, and by moving
ahead in an irreversible, and in a way perverse, penetration.
As far as pragmatics is concerned, such a journey provides us with an apt metaphor, both with regard to the
landscape traveled and to the various intellectual landmarks and influences encountered there. It seems safe to
say that the pragmatic landscape is not only in flux, but that its movements and tendencies have steadily
accelerated their courses. Thus, from a humble beginning at the remote outposts of philosophy and linguistic
semantics, pragmatics has developed into a vast realm where often conflicting theories and practices reign—just
as it was the case for our Brit, traveling the always unruly and undefinable territories that at one time were
loosely integrated components of the Austrian-Hungarian kaiserliche und ko¨ nigliche twin monarchy, the
‘‘k.u.k. Doppelmonarchie’’, from the years before the Great War. But also, just as it is not only interesting,
but useful for us to learn about happenings in those parts in the twilight between the two world wars, and
confront them with the situation as it has evolved and especially as it is present to our minds today, so too is it
useful, nay necessary, for us to reflect on the developments of our discipline ever since the days of John L. Austin
and his burgeoning speech act theory. And in this respect, the new (second, 2006) edition of the mother volume
to the present work, the Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics along with its present, concise offshoot,
seem to be timely undertakings.
If one were to ask what in particular has changed since those early times, the answer may be that pragmatics
has become a ‘discipline’ in its own right, rather than a somewhat ill-defined by-product of other branches of
language studies. The notorious ‘wastebasket of semantics’ comes to mind: an expression due to Yehoshua Bar-
Hillel, who considered pragmatics more or less as uncharted territory, a bit like those Western expanses in
America where a man still could do whatever he wanted to do and get away with it, as no rules or regulations
had yet been invented to provide law-based security and establish rule-driven well-formedness. In contrast, we
observe a trend towards what could be called a ‘legalization’ of pragmatics, starting in its earlier development
and continuing until the present day. Even though it still is too early to speak of a unified scientific discipline (a
term which may more properly be applied to other branches of linguistics, such as phonetics or syntax), there is
no doubt that pragmatics, as a discipline, has come into its own.
It would be wrong, however, to consider the growth and deployment of pragmatics as a science uniquely as a
‘breaking away’ from older disciplines like semantics or syntax. Rather, the development that led to the rise of
pragmatics started as a linguistics-internal movement (inspired by the philosophy of language of the Austinian
type), whose ultimate endpoint could not be foreseen (and, as many will say, is still out of sight and reach).
Whereas, on the one hand, certain developments in pragmatics may have been triggered by the descriptive
aporias and insufficiencies involved in purely semantic or even syntactic ways of considering language, on the
other it is equally true that many modern pragmaticists gathered their inspiration from outside the realm of
linguistics proper.
The two streams in this development: an ‘intralinguistic’ one, dealing with descriptive and explanatory
questions from a linguistics-internal point of view, and an ‘extralinguistic’ one, emphasizing the social character
of the language user and the language used, while insisting on the use of language as a defining feature of
pragmatics, often seemed to be on a collision course, yet at other times were able to negotiate a peaceful
coexistence. In particular, when one looks at some of the recent developments in pragmatics (some of which the
present encyclopedia has only just begun to chart), it becomes clear that the two streams, or tendencies, have
much to tell one another. Not only does the ‘purely’ syntactic or semantic approach not suffice, when we are dealing with typical pragmatic phenomena (such as the manipulative or rhetorical uses of language that ever
since the Sophists have been the hallmark of a pragmatically oriented study of language); in addition, the
internal contradictions that arose from the desire to create a unified matrix, valid for semantic as well as
syntactic description (as, e.g., exemplified in ‘Montague grammar’) have led to the acceptance of what some
have called a ‘pragmatic intrusion’ into semantics (cf., among others, Levinson 2000: 164 et pass.).
For many, the very idea that rules could be given for pragmatic use of language has from the beginning been a
non sequitur: the creative use of language by the individual in a societal environment could only be circumscribed
by the classical, individual-based methods of linguistics, not defined (Mey 2002: 183). Instead,
pragmatics has from its very inception promoted the development of society-oriented approaches, that
is, approaches that take their point of departure in what is or can be out there, in the social context surrounding
us, and then intrapolate these realities and possibilities onto the actual situation in which the language user himor
herself is involved. Such approaches contrast starkly with the well-known efforts by theoretical linguists,
traditional sociolinguists, and other social scientists to first define the ‘said’, and then try to figure out what the
conditions are that make a particular utterance ‘correct’ or ‘acceptable’.
In all these cases, there is a certain ‘ecological’ principle at work, by which users endeavor to maximize their
results with minimal efforts, while respecting their linguistic and social environments. This ‘ecological turn’ has
inspired such differing tendencies as, on the one hand, relevance theory, and by what has been called ‘default
semantics’ on the other (cf. Jaszczolt 2005 and the article by that name in this volume). Similarly, we have been
witness to the rise of ‘optimality theory’ in its various versions—this latter approach is still in its infancy and
has not yet reached acceptance in most of the ‘border territories’ (even so, the present work does have an
article outlining some notions and possible approaches, cf. the eponymous article presented in the body of this
volume).
Other recent developments have resulted in psycholinguistic excursus (or should I say: ‘excursions’, to remain
in the traveling metaphor?). Here, one finds a number of articles dealing with developmental aspects of
pragmatics (the psycholinguistic view) or approaches that are oriented towards cognitive psychology (as in
‘cognitive pragmatics’). More generally, the cognitive approach itself, originally considered as an extension of
epistemic and psychological ways of looking at language use, has come into its own as well, leading to a whole
flurry of writings on venerable notions such as metaphor and metonymy, not to forget the return to ‘classical’,
speech act-based ideas—first of all the concept of the speech act itself and its conditions, injecting them with
new interpretations of the time-honored Searlean and Austinian conditions and restrictive maxims, including
further extended notions, such as that of ‘flouting a maxim’ (on which see the article of that name, this volume).
The idea that language belongs, not only to a particular culture or country, but also to the speakers
themselves, has gained some momentum in the past decades. Thus, the understanding that not everything
linguistic is accessible to everybody at all times, and neither to everybody in the same (legally sanctioned)
fashion, has given rise to speculations about accessibility in language, and to what has been called ‘territory of
information’; see, e.g., the article on ‘accessibility theory’ in this volume, or the writings of Akio Kamio (1994,
1995, 1997) and recent work by John Heritage (2007). To express one’s condolences, for instance (to take
Heritage’s example), presupposes that one has the correct ‘stance’ in regard to the ‘condolee’. More generally,
all speech acting on principle belongs to society, and is only derivatively made possible through the language
user’s active participation in that society—ideas that have been around ever since the eighties (see Mey 1985),
and which have lately come to fruition in my theory of ‘pragmatic acts’ (on which see the article of that name in
the current volume; compare also Mey 2008).
The idea that language use and linguistic activities in general (either in the phonetic, syntactic, semantic, or
pragmatic realm) obey some kind of ‘law of least effort’ has been fruitfully mined not only by the protagonists of
relevance theory, but also in a more general way by the defenders of optimal, rather than maximal, solutions to
linguistic problems.What this means is that rather than abiding by some strict rules (like those that allow one to
say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to questions of grammaticality), the thought that an optimal solution often consists in accepting
a certain deviation from strict standards has taken hold in the sciences of the human over the past decades.
Early on, the psychologists started to operate with a notion of ‘prototype’, meaning: a concept with fuzzy
edges all around; and in pragmatics, the suggestion that conditions are more optimally construed as constraints
on the environment than as production rules binding the individual user, has gained considerable popularity.
While a fully fledged theory of ‘optimality’ is something that we will have to wait (and work) for (as I remarked
above), we may observe, at the interfaces between pragmatics and the other linguistic areas, an ever growing
trend towards voluntary collaboration, rather than towards unification under some stringent formal umbrella.
Given the newness of such approaches, there are only a few articles in the present volume that reflect this tendency; had there been more time, and had the selection process been less restricted (viz., practically to the
original articles in the fourteen mother volumes of 2006), more current work might have been made available.
One issue still bothers the compiler of the present volume, as it did with regard to its 1998 predecessor. It is an
issue familiar to all who have ever tried to produce a conspectus-type, work-oriented overview of some area of
knowledge. The dilemma of choosing between an alphabetical sequencing of contributions versus an hierarchical,
thematically-based division of the field has bothered dictionary and encyclopedia makers for as long as their
works have been around. The great encyclope´distes of the 18th century, whom I quoted earlier, opted for a strict
alphabetical order; while I am not privy to their motivations, I can imagine that ease of access must have been
one of them.
One is reminded of the often occurring situation where an opportunistic, ‘seniority’-based order wins out over
a logical one for the simple reason that logics are not universal. Compare the nightmare of those medieval
philosophers who tried to capture the whole world under one metaphysical hat; closer to home, one needs only
to think of the familiar situation where keys and other important items become practically impossible to find
because the owner (often identical with the original depositor) no longer is certain which logic has guided his or
her movements while putting away the object in question. Most techniques of object (and knowledge) retrieval
operate by a logic of local associations: where did I go first, where from there, and so on. The alphabet provides
us with an easy to remember, neutral sequence where everything has its place in a mostly universally accepted
order; and this logic is what I have decided to follow also in the present volume.
It has been said by the famous Dr. Samuel Johnson (whose doctoral dignity seems to have been more honorific
than acquired by hard work) that ‘‘dictionaries are like watches: the worst is better than none and the best
cannot be expected to go quite true’’ (in Mrs. Piozzi’s Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson). Applying this
dictum to the present work and its generic characteristics, one could say that encyclopedias, despite their
recognized usefulness, never will achieve the mandate that is inherent in their title, viz. to give a full conspectus
of an entire discipline or area of knowledge, let alone of the human knowledge in toto.
But even a more modest effort, as represented by the present, concise work, may be useful in giving us the time
of day in more than one sense: not just telling us what is going on, but discuss it (through the voices of the
articles’ authors) in an intelligent and accessible fashion. If this should happen in the case of the present work, its
compiler may have escaped the common doom of all compilers, embodied in the universal tension between that
which is attainable and that which should be attained. And with these reservations in mind, I want to give the
book my best wishes on its way to the reading public, and say: I liber ‘Book, go forth’! May your travel be as
happy, and lead to as many interesting encounters, as was the case for the audacious young Englishman, whose
peripeties inspired me while I was writing these lines.
Jacob L. Mey
Austin, Texas
9 February 2009